difficult women; Joan Juliet Buck looks at the spring lineup and finds sympathy for the she-devils: multiple Mormon wives, Jean Harris, and Princess Margaret.(Big Love)(Mrs. Harris)(The Queen's Sister)(Gideon's Daughter)(Eugene O'Neill)(Television program review)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

On HBO, the new series Big Love zeroes in on the Mormons of Utah, specifically ones who practice polygamy. Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) has three wives and a hardware store called Home Plus. He's an urban polygamist-no compound, no mountain cluster of secret shacks for him. Bill breaks the law in suburban Salt Lake City, in three brand-new adjoining houses, in full view of non-Mormon neighbors. His first wife, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), is a pleasant, controlled woman, a cancer survivor and substitute teacher. His second, Nicki (Chloe Sevigny), is the entitled daughter of "the prophet," a young woman with eighteen brothers who's addicted to catalog shopping. Sevigny-sneaky, introverted and competitive, a braid cresting along her head and creepy collars on her blouses, makes Nicki at once pathetic and a menace. The third is Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin, a strong young actress), who arrived as the baby-sitter and now has two babies of her own, a one-third share in Bill, and 30 pounds of baby fat. The skinny, near-feral prophet is Harry Dean Stanton, our national-treasure version of good ol' boy, and various other Mormons and renegades are played by a medley of actors who carry the clanging counterculture baggage of the seventies with them: Bruce Dern, Mary Kay Place, Grace Zabriskie.

The show is slow-paced, wondrously attached to the trivial in the daily lives of the relatives of prophets. To outsiders, Mormons are a mysterious sect, which makes each infraction reverberate with shocks not felt since the Victorian era. Mormons making love! Mormon hubby popping Viagra to keep Mormon wives happy! Mormons in money trouble!

It's not too late to catch Annette Bening's great performance in HBO's Mrs. Harris, as the starchy headmistress who made Westchester history when she shot her lover Herman Tarnower, the Scarsdale diet doctor, in 1980. At the time I barely registered this 50-something lady who improbably had both a sex life and a nuclear temper; the movie, written and directed by the playwright Phyllis Nagy, fills in the blanks and colors up the story with rare verve. Bening's blondes are always dangerous women. Under a careful pouffy coiffure, her Jean Harris is subject to overwhelming feelings. She effects masterful transformations from careful newcomer to needy mistress to out-of-control weeping monster. The British Ben Kingsley, on the other hand, plays Brooklyn as if it were Manchester. The women win: Bening and, wonderful in small parts, Frances Fisher, Cloris Leachman, Mary McDonnell, and Chloe Sevigny.

Princess Margaret was bad, she was sad, she was talented and funny and bright, imperious and pissed at the world. She had to give up Peter Townsend because the Church of England would not allow her to marry a divorced man, and two decades later, she became the first member of the royal family to divorce, which led to the general collapse of values in ...